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Never did either poet or lover gain anything by | the reluctance that anything should be lost; the complaining.

Southey. Such sparks as our critics are in general, give neither warmth nor light, and only make people stare and stand out of the way, lest they should fall on them.

unconsciousness that the paring is less nutritious and less savoury than the core; in short, the prolix, the prosaic; a sickly sameness of colour; a sad deficiency of vital heat.

Southey. Where the language is subdued and somewhat cold, there may nevertheless be internal warmth and spirit. There is a paleness in intense fires; they do not flame out nor sparkle. As you know, Mr. Professor, it is only a weak wine that sends the cork up to the ceiling.

Porson. Those who have assaulted you and Mr. Wordsworth are perhaps less malicious than unprincipled; the pursuivants of power, or the running footmen of faction. Your patience is admirable; his impatience is laughable. Nothing is more amusing than to see him raise his bristles Porson. I never was fond of the florid: but I and expose his tusk at every invader of his brush- would readily pardon the weak wine you allude wood, every marauder of his hips and haws. to, for committing this misdemeanour. Upon my Southey. Among all the races of men, we Eng-word, I have no such complaint to make against lish are at once the most generous and the most it. I said little at the time about these poems, ill-tempered. We all carry sticks in our hands to and usually say little more on better. In our cut down the heads of the higher poppies. praises and censures, we should see before us one Porson. A very high poppy, and surcharged sole object: instruction. A single well-set post, with Lethean dew, is that before us. But continue. with a few plain letters upon it, directs us better Southey. I would have added, that each resents than fifty that turn about and totter, covered as in another any injustice; and resents it indeed so they may be from top to bottom with coronals violently, as to turn unjust on the opposite side. and garlands. Wordsworth, in whose poetry you yourself admit there are many and great beauties, will, I am afraid, be tossed out of his balance by a sudden jerk in raising him.

Porson. Nothing more likely. The reaction may be as precipitate as the pull is now violent against him. Injudicious friends will cause him less uneasiness, but will do him greater mischief than intemperate opponents.

Southey. You can not be accused of either fault: but you demand too much, and pardon no remissness. However, you have at no time abetted by your example the paltry pelters of golden fruit paled out from them.

Porson. Removed alike from the crowd and the coterie, I have always avoided, with timid prudence, the bird-cage walk of literature. I have withholden from Herman and some others, a part of what is due to them; and I regret it. Sometimes I have been arrogant, never have I been malicious. Unhappily, I was educated in a school of criticism where the exercises were too gladiatorial. Looking at my elders in it, they appeared to me so ugly, in part from their contortions, and in part from their scars, that I suspected it must be a dangerous thing to wield a scourge of vipers; and I thought it no very creditable appointment to be linkboy or pandar at an alley leading down to the Furies. Age and infirmity have rendered me milder than I was. I am loth to fire off my gun in the warren which lies before us; loth to startle the snug little creatures, each looking so comfortable at the mouth of its burrow, or skipping about at short distances, or frisking and kicking up the sand along the thriftless heath. You have shown me some very good poetry in your author: I have some very bad in him to show you. Each of our actions is an incitement to improve him. But what we cannot improve or alter, lies in the constitution of the man: the determination to hold you in one spot until you have heard him through;

Southey. We have about a million critics in Great Britain; not a soul of which critics entertains the slightest doubt of his own infallibility. You, with all your learning and all your canons of criticism, will never make them waver.

Porson. We will not waste our breath on the best of them. Rather let me turn toward you, so zealous, so ardent, so indefatigable a friend, and, if reports are true, so ill-requited. When your client was the ridicule of all the wits in England, of whom Canning and Frere were foremost, by your indignation at injustice he was righted, and more than righted. For although you attributed to him what perhaps was not greatly above his due, yet they who acknowledge your authority, and contend under your banner, have carried him much further; nay, further, I apprehend, than is expedient or safe; and they will drop him before the day closes, where there is nobody to show the way home.

Southey. Could not you, Mr. Professor, do that good service to him, which others in another province have so often done to you?

Porson. Nobody better, nobody with less danger from interruptions. But I must be even more enthusiastic than you are, if I prefer this excursion to your conversation. My memory, although the strongest part of me, is apt to stagger and swerve under verses piled incompactly. In our last meeting, you had him mostly to yourself, and you gave me abundantly of the best; at present, while my gruel is before me, it appears no unseasonable time to throw a little salt into both occasionally, as may suit my palate. You will not be displeased?

Southey. Certainly not, unless you are unjust; nor even then, unless I find the injustice to be founded on ill-will.

Porson. That can not be. I stand

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Beside, knowing that my verdicts will be regis- | poetically expressed. Few, however, are there

tered and recorded, I dare not utter a hasty or an inconsiderate one. I lay it down as an axiom, that languor is the cause or the effect of most disorders, and is itself the very worst in poetry. Wordsworth's is an instrument which has no trumpet-stop.

Southey. But, such as it is, he blows it well. Surely it is something to have accompanied sound sense with pleasing harmony, whether in verse or prose.

Porson. What is the worth of a musical instrument which has no high key? Even Pan's pipe rises above the baritones; yet I never should mistake it for an organ.

Southey. It is evident that you are ill-disposed to countenance the moderns; I mean principally the living.

Porson. They are less disposed to countenance one another.

Southey. Where there is genius there should be geniality. The curse of quarrelsomeness, of hand against every man, was inflicted on the children of the desert; not on those who pastured their flocks on the fertile banks of the Euphrates, or contemplated the heavens from the elevated ranges of Chaldea.

Porson. Let none be cast down by the malice of their contemporaries, or surprised at the defection of their associates, when he himself who has

which do not contain much of the superfluous, and more of the prosaic. For one nod of approbation, I therefore give two of drowsiness. You accuse me of injustice, not only to this author, but to all the living. Now Byron is living; there is more spirit in Byron: Scott is living; there is more vivacity and variety in Scott. Byron exhibits disjecti membra poetæ; and strong muscles quiver throughout; but rather like galvanism than healthy life. There is a freshness in all Scott's scenery; a vigour and distinctness in all his characters. He seems the brother-in-arms of Froissart. I admire his Marmion in particular. Give me his massy claymore, and keep in the cabinet or the boudoir the jewelled hilt of the oriental dirk. The pages which my forefinger keeps open for you, contain a thing in the form of a sonnet; a thing to which, for insipidity, tripe au naturel is a dainty.

"Great men have been among us, hands that penned And tongues that uttered wisdom; better none. The later Sydney, Marvel, Harrington, Young Vane, and others who called Milton friend.” When he potted these fat lampreys, he forgot the condiments, which the finest lampreys want; but how close and flat he has laid them! I see nothing in poetry since

"Four-and-twenty fiddlers all in a row,"

fit to compare with it. How the good men and true stand, shoulder to shoulder, and keep one another up!

Southey. In these censures and sarcasms, you

forget

such.

tended more than any man living to purify the poetry and to liberalize the criticism of his nation, is represented, by one whom he has called "inoffensive and virtuous," as an author all whose poetry is "not worth five shillings," and of whom another has said that "his verses sound like "Alcandrumque Haliumque Noemonaque Prytanimque." dumb-bells." Such are the expressions of two From the Spanish I could bring forward many among your friends and familiars, both under obligations to you for the earliest and weightiest testimony in their favour. It would appear as if the exercise of the poetical faculty left irritation and weakness behind it, depriving its possessor at once of love and modesty, and making him resemble a spoilt child, who most indulges in its frowardness when you exclaim "what a spoilt child it is!" and carry it crying and kicking out of the room. Your poetical neighbours, I hear, complain bitterly that you never have lauded them at large in your Critical Reviews.

Southey. I never have; because one grain of commendation more to the one than the other would make them enemies; and no language of mine would be thought adequate by either to his deserts. Each could not be called the greatest poet of the age; and by such compliance I should have been for ever divested of my authority as a critic. I lost, however, no opportunity of commending heartily what is best in them; and I have never obtruded on anyone's notice what is amiss, but carefully concealed it. I wish you were equally charitable.

Porson. I will be; and generous too. There are several things in these volumes, beside that

Porson. But here is a sonnet; and the sonnet admits not that approach to the prosaic which is allowable in the ballad, particularly in the ballad of action. For which reason I never laughed, as many did, at

"Lord Lion King at Arms."

Scott knew what he was about. In his chivalry, and in all the true, gaiety is mingled with strength, and facility with majesty. Lord Lion may be defended by the practice of the older poets who describe the like scenes and adventures. There is much resembling it, for instance, in Chevy Chase. Marmion is a poem of chivalry, partaking (in some measure) of the ballad, but rising in sundry places to the epic, and closing with a battle worthy of the Iliad. Ariosto has demonstrated that a romance may be so adorned by the apparatus, and so elevated by the spirit of poetry, as to be taken for an epic; but it has a wider field of its own, with outlying forests and chases. Spanish and Italian poetry often seems to run in extremely slender veins through a vast extent of barren ground.

Southey. But often, too, it is pure and plastic. which you recited, containing just thoughts | The republicans, whose compact phalanx you

have unsparingly ridiculed in Wordsworth's sonnet, make surely no sorrier a figure than

" A Don Alvaro de Luna

Condestable de Castilla

El Re Don Juan el Segundo." Porson. What an admirable Spanish scholar must Mr. Wordsworth be! How completely has he transfused into his own compositions all the spirit of those verses! Nevertheless, it is much to be regretted that, in resolving on simplicity, he did not place himself under the tuition of Burns; which quality Burns could have taught him in perfection; but others he never could have imparted to such an auditor. He would have sung in vain to him

"Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled."

A song more animating than ever Tyrtæus sang to the fife before the Spartans. But simplicity in Burns is never stale and unprofitable. In Burns there is no waste of words out of an illshouldered sack; no troublesome running backward and forward of little, idle, ragged ideas; no ostentation of sentiment in the surtout of selfishness. Where was I?

"Better none... The later Sidney... Young Vane . . .

These moralists could act... and... comprehend!" We might expect as much if " none were better." "They knew how genuine glory was... put on! What is genuine is not put on.

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Southey. I do not agree in this opinion: for although of late years France hath exhibited no man of exalted wisdom or great worth, yet surely her Revolution cast up several both intellectual and virtuous. But, like fishes in dark nights and wintry weather, allured by deceptive torches, they came to the surface only to be speared.

Porson. Although there were many deplorable ends in the French Revolution, there was none so deplorable as the last sonnet's. So diffuse and pointless and aimless is not only this, but fifty more, that the author seems to have written them in hedger's gloves, on blotting paper. If he could by any contrivance have added to

"Perpetual emptiness unceasing change," or some occasional change at least, he would have been more tolerable.

Southey. He has done it lately: he has written, although not yet published, a vast number of sonnets on Capital Punishment.

Porson. Are you serious? Already he has inflicted it far and wide, for divers attempts made upon him to extort his meaning.

Southey. Remember, poets superlatively great have composed things below their dignity. Suffice it to mention only Milton's translation of the Psalms.

Porson. Milton was never half so wicked a regicide as when he lifted up his hand and smote King David. He has atoned for it, however, by composing a magnificent psalm of his own, in the form of a sonnet.

Southey. You mean on the massacre of the Protestants in Piedmont. This is indeed the noblest of sonnets.

Porson. There are others in Milton comparable to it, but none elsewhere. In the poems of Shakspeare, which are printed as sonnets, there some

Now the secret is out; make the most of it. An- times is a singular strength and intensity of other thing they taught us,

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"What strength was... that could not bend
But in magnanimous meekness.”

Brave Oliver! brave and honest Ireton! We know pretty well where your magnanimity lay; we never could so cleverly find out your meekness. Did you leave it peradventure on the window-seat at Whitehall? The "later Sidney and young Vane, who could call Milton friend," and Milton himself, were gentlemen of your kidney, and they were all as meek as Moses with their arch-enemy.

"Perpetual emptiness: unceasing change." How could the change be unceasing if the emptiness was perpetual?

"No single volume paramount: no code:" That is untrue. There is a Code, and the best in Europe: there was none promulgated under our Commonwealth.

"No master-spirit, no determined road,
And equally a want of books and men."

thought, with little of that imagination which was afterward to raise him highest in the universe of poetry. Even the interest we take in the private life of this miraculous man cannot keep the volume in our hands long together. We acknowledge great power, but we experien great weariness. Were I a poet, I would much rather have written the Allegro or the Penseroso, than all those, and moreover than nearly all that portion of our metre, the capitulary of lyric. which, wanting a definite term, is ranged under

Southey. Evidently you dislike the sonnet; otherwise there are very many in Wordsworth which would have obtained your approbation.

Porson. I have no objection to see mince-meat put into small patty-pans, all of equal size, with ribs at odd distances: my objection lies mainly where I find it without salt or succulence. Milton was glad, I can imagine, to seize upon the sonnet, because it restricted him from a profuse expression of what soon becomes tiresome, praise. In addressing it to the Lord Protector, he was aware that prolixity of speech was both unnecessary and indecorous: in addressing it to Vane, and Lawrence, and Lawes, he felt that friendship is never

the stronger for running through long periods: | unless we had abundant proofs that heaviness, and in addressing it to

"Captain, or Colonel, or Knight-at-Arms,"

he might be confident that fourteen such glorious lines were a bulwark sufficient for his protection against a royal army.

Southey. I am highly gratified at your enthusiasm. A great poet represents a great portion of the human race. Nature delegated to Shakspeare the interests and direction of the whole: to Milton a smaller part, but with plenary power over it; and she bestowed on him such fervour and majesty of eloquence as on no other mortal in any age. Porson. Perhaps, indeed, not on Demosthenes himself.

Southey. Without many of those qualities of which a loftier genius is constituted, without much fire, without a wide extent of range, without an eye that can look into the heart, or an organ that can touch it, Demosthenes had great dexterity and great force. By the union of these properties he always was impressive on his audience: but his orations bear less testimony to the seal of genius than the dissertations of Milton do.

taken opportunely, is the parent of hilarity. The
most beautiful iris rises in bright expanse out of
the minutest watery particles. Little fond as I
am of quoting my own authority, permit me to
repeat, in this sick chamber, an observation I once
made in another almost as sick :

"When wine and gin are gone and spent,
Small beer is then most excellent."

But small beer itself is not equally small nor
equally vapid. Our friend's poetry, like a cloak
of gum-elastic, makes me sweat without keeping
me warm. With regard to the texture and sewing,
what think you of

"No thorns can pierce those tender feet, Whose life was as the violet sweet!" Southey. It should have been written "her tender feet;" because, as the words stand, it is the life of the tender feet that is sweet as the violet.

Porson. If there is a Wordsworth school, it certainly is not a grammar school. Is there any lower? It must be a school for very little boys, and a rod should be hung up in the centre. Take another sample.

"There is a blessing in the air,

Which seems a sense of joy to yield." Was ever line so inadequate to its purpose as the second! If the blessing is evident and certain, the sense of joy arising from it must be evident and certain also, not merely seeming. Whatever only seems to yield a sense of joy, is scarcely a blessing. The verse adds nothing to the one before, but rather tends to empty it of the little it conveys.

Porson. You judge correctly that there are several parts of genius in which Demosthenes is deficient, although in none whatever of the consummate orator. In that character there is no necessity for stage-exhibitions of wit, however well it may be received in an oration from the most persuasive and the most stately: Demosthenes, when he catches at wit, misses it, and falls flat in the mire. But by discipline and training, by abstinence from what is florid and too juicy, and by loitering with no idle words on his way, he "And shady groves, for recreation framed." acquired the hard muscles of a wrestler, and«Recreation!" and in groves that are “framed !” nobody could stand up against him with success or impunity.

Southey. Milton has equal strength, without an abatement of beauty: not a sinew sharp or rigid, not a vein varicose or inflated. Hercules killed robbers and ravishers with his knotted club; he cleansed also royal stables by turning whole rivers into them: Apollo, with no labour or effort, overcame the Python; brought round him, in the full accordance of harmony, all the Muses; and illuminated with his sole splendour the universal world. Such is the difference I see between Demosthenes and Milton.

Porson. Would you have anything more of Mr. Wordsworth, after the contemplation of two men who resemble a god and a demi-god in the degrees of power?

Southey. I do not believe you can find in another of his poems so many blemishes and debilities as you have pointed out.

Porson. Within the same space, perhaps not. But my complaint is not against a poverty of thought or expression here and there; it is against the sickliness and prostration of the whole body. I should never have thought it worth my while to renew and continue our conversation on it, unless that frequently such discussions lead to something better than the thing discussed; and

"With high respect and gratitude sincere."

This is indeed a good end of a letter, but not of a poem. I am weary of decomposing these lines of sawdust: they verily would disgrace any poetryprofessor.

Southey. Acknowledging the prosaic flatness of the last verse you quoted, the sneer with which you pronounced the final word seems to me un

merited.

Porson. That is not gratitude which is not "sincere." A scholar ought to write nothing so incorrect as the phrase; a poet nothing so imbecile as the verse.

Southey. Sincere conveys a stronger sense to most understandings than the substantive alone would; words which we can do without, are not therefore useless. Many may be of service and efficacy to certain minds, which other minds pass over inobservantly; and there are many which, however light in themselves, wing the way for a well-directed point that could never reach the

heart without it.

Porson. This is true in general, but here inapplicable. I will tell you what is applicable on all occasions, both in poetry and prose: aiei apiσtevely: without reference to weak or common minds. If we give an entertainment, we do not set

on the table pap and panada, just because a guest may be liable to indigestion: we rather send these dismal dainties to his chamber, and treat our heartier friends opiparously. I am wandering. If we critics are logical, it is the most that can be required at our hands: we should go out of our record if we were philosophical.

Southey. Without both qualities not even the lightest poetry should be reprehended. They do not exclude wit, which sometimes shows inexactnesses where mensuration would be tardy and incommodious.

Porson. I fear I am at my wits' end under this exhausted receiver. Here are, however, a few

more Excerpta for you. I shall add but few;

although I have marked with my pencil, in these two small volumes, more than seventy spots of sterility or quagmire. Mr. Wordsworth has hitherto had for his critics men who uncovered and darkened his blemishes in order to profit by them, and afterward expounded his songs and expatiated on his beauties in order to obtain the same result; like picture-cleaners, who besmear a picture all over with washy dirtiness, then wipe away one-half of it, making it whiter than it ever was before. And nothing draws such crowds to

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religion. Poets may take great liberties; but not much above the nymphs; they must be circumspect and orderly with gods and goddesses of any account and likelihood. Although the ancients laid many children at the door of Jupiter, which he never could be brought to acknowledge, yet it is downright impiety to attribute to the God of Mercy, as his, so ill-favoured a vixen as Slaughter. Southey. We might enter into a long disquisition on this subject.

Porson. God forbid we should do all we might do! Have you rested long enough? Come along, then, to Goody Blake's.

"Old Goody Blake was old and poor" What is the consequence?

"Ill-fed she was, and thinly clad,
And any man who passed her door
Might see.'

What might he see?

"How poor a hut she had."

Southey. Ease and simplicity are two expressions often confounded and misapplied. We usually find ease arising from long practice, and sometimes from a delicate ear without it; but simplicity may be rustic and awkward; of which, it must be acknowledged, there are innumerable examples in these volumes. But surely it would be a pleasanter occupation to recollect the many

that are natural, and to search out the few that are graceful.

Porson. We have not yet taken our leave of Goody Blake.

"All day she spun in her poor dwelling,

And then 'twas three hours' work at night;
Alas! 'twas hardly worth the telling."

I am quite of that opinion.

"But when the ice our streams did fetter,"

Which was the fetterer? We may guess, but not from the grammar.

Show me anything like this in the worst poet that ever lived, and I will acknowledge that I am the worst critic. A want of sympathy is some- "Oh! then how her old bones would shake! times apparent in the midst of poetical pretences. You would have said, if you had met her," Before us a gang of gipsies, perhaps after a long Now, what would you have said? "Goody! come journey, perhaps after a marriage, perhaps after into my house, and warm yourself with a pint of the birth of a child among them, are found rest-ale at the kitchen fire"? No such naughty thing. ing a whole day in one place. What is the reflec

tion on it?

"The mighty moon!

This way she looks, as if at them,

And they regard her not!

O! better wrong and strife;

Rather vain deeds or evil than such life!” Mr. Southey! is this the man you represented to me, in our last conversation, as innocent and philosophical? What! better be guilty of robbery or bloodshed than not be looking at the moon? better let the fire go out and the children cry with hunger and cold? The philanthropy of poets is surely ethereal, and is here, indeed, a matter of moonshine.

Southey. The sentiment is indefensible. But in the stoutest coat a stitch may give way somewhere. Porson. Our business is, in this place, with humanity. We will go forward, if you please, to

"You would have said, if you had met her,

'Twas a hard time for Goody Blake!"

Southey. If you said only that, you must have been the colder of the two, and God had done less for you than for her. Porson.

"Sad case it was, as you may think,
As every one who knew her says.'

Now, mind ye! all this balderdash is from "Poems purely of the Imagination." Such is what is notified to us in the title-page. In spite of a cold below zero, I hope you are awake, Mr. Southey! How do you find nose and ears? All safe and sound? Are the acoustics in tolerable order for harmony? Listen then. Here follows "An Anecdote for Fathers, showing how the practice of Lying may be taught." Such is the title, a somewhat prolix one: but for the soul of

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